Palace ceremonials and court etiquette are an important component of the public and private life of monarchies but it has not been studied thoroughly in recent times.
I recommend these anthropological approaches: John D. Kelly and Martha Kaplan (1990) History, Structure, and Ritual. Annual Review of Anthropology. Vol 19, pp. 119-150; David Kertzer (1988) Ritual, Politics, and Power. New Haven: Yale University Press--and Victor Turner. Turner is the "classical" theorist on which we still rely for a foundational view of the meaning of ritual. For example, Turner's 1969 The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (ithaca: Cornell University Press). These works are theoretical rather than descriptive of ceremonials but have some illustrations cited.
Thank you very much, Catherine. I did not know them, and indeed they will be very useful (I know better the work of R. Rappaport).
For Western Europe, you can hardly find a better place to than Kantorowicz' The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (1957). In this seminal work, he explores the symbolic and theatrical aspects of political power, which he finds to be inseparable from legal and literary fiction. Beginning in the twelfth century and moving forward to the English civil war, Kantorowicz tracks the appropriation of theological metaphors, above all the ecclesiastical body of the Church and the incarnated body of Christ, for secular political purposes, showing their distinctive use by English common lawyers for the crown. Kantorowicz shows how the idea of the two bodies could morph into the distinction between person and office, which in turn played a crucial role in the dethroning of Charles I in 1649. BTW-The work drowns in footnotes which you may also find helpful.
Sorry for the delay. I would surely recommend "The cultures of his kingdom" by William Tronzo, a very well-informed book on the Norman Cappella Palatina at Palermo, Sicily. The last chapters are entirely dedicated to court ceremonies in medieval Europe.
Thank you very much for this reference; indeed it will be very useful for me!
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